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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28727898">An Apple Like a Ruby</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/musegnome/pseuds/musegnome'>musegnome</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman &amp; Terry Pratchett</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Twelve Dancing Princesses Fusion, Brief Explicit Content, M/M, Mystery</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 12:01:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,524</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28727898</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/musegnome/pseuds/musegnome</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A vaguely human shape loomed from the dark.</p><p>The figure offered a hand, and Aziraphale took it warily. As their fingers touched, the noise of the festivities burst into Aziraphale’s ears: music, wordless laughter, dancing feet. They moved fully into the light and Aziraphale’s breath caught. His partner was beautiful. Yellow-gold eyes. Long red hair and a long body dressed in sleek black clothes, long fingers warm on his back as he was pressed into the throng.</p><p>They danced for hours. Had this been a ball in his mother’s castle, he would have stopped for food and wine, or to thank the musicians, or simply to rest. But here, things weren’t quite right. The steps of the dance were wrong, the music off-key...</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>143</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>GO-Events Good Omens Mystery AU Event Works, Name That Author Round Five: After Dark Redux, Top Crowley Library</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>An Apple Like a Ruby</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The door shouldn’t be open. Couldn’t be open, because it didn’t exist. Yet the creak of its hinge had woken him, and it was there in the wall of his bedchamber, agape in the moonlight.</p><p>Before he was even properly awake, Aziraphale found himself through the door and standing at the top of a stairway that spiraled into darkness. He descended one stair, then two; then he hurried blindly downward, the patter of his bare feet on stone the only noise.</p><p>The stairs ended in flagstones shot through with gleaming mica, lit by torches on long posts in the ground. With his step from dark to light there was a flash of power. He raised his hands to touch. His long platinum curls were now piled elaborately atop his head, and his light nightgown had been replaced with a heavy dress of gold satin, petticoats swirling about his legs. Soft slippers slid from nowhere onto his feet.</p><p>He was in a great, dark cavern whose ceiling he could not see. Ahead of him stretched a glittering avenue lined with trees. Copper trees at first, then golden. Then diamond, he thought, but when he broke off a branch it snapped like glass.</p><p>At the end of the path was a torch-ringed clearing filled with a silent blaze of light and colour. It looked to be a grand revel - dancers twirling, musicians playing – but not a single sound reached his ears.</p><p>A vaguely human shape loomed from the dark.</p><p>The figure offered a hand, and Aziraphale took it warily. As their fingers touched, the noise of the festivities burst into Aziraphale’s ears: music, wordless laughter, dancing feet. They moved fully into the light and Aziraphale’s breath caught. His partner was beautiful. Yellow-gold eyes. Long red hair and a long body dressed in sleek black clothes, long fingers warm on his back as he was pressed into the throng.</p><p>They danced for hours. Had this been a ball in his mother’s castle, he would have stopped for food and wine, or to thank the musicians, or simply to rest. But here, things weren’t quite right. The steps of the dance were wrong, the music off-key – and as Aziraphale truly looked at what surrounded him, he began to be afraid. One reveler had a mouthful of sharp teeth. Another, hair twisted and growing like horns.</p><p>When he realised his partner’s eyes were slit-pupilled, saw the tips of fangs as he smiled, Aziraphale stumbled in fear.</p><p>He was caught and steadied by slim hands, and he was drawn away from the other dancers, down a path through a strange orchard where red jewels hung like fruit from silver trees. The fey music faded behind them.</p><p>Aziraphale opened his mouth to speak, but a quick finger pressed to his lips, as if in warning.  He flinched at the unexpected touch.</p><p>At Aziraphale’s recoil the man looked sad, so breathtakingly sad and so breathtakingly handsome in his sadness that without thinking Aziraphale stepped forward and kissed him. His lips were warm and his mouth was hot, and his fangs were sharp on Aziraphale’s tongue. Aziraphale ran his hands over his partner’s chest, gripped the smooth black silk of his jacket; he was backed up one, two, three steps until he came up against one of the silver trees.</p><p>Their kisses were frantic now, and his partner’s arousal was hard against his own even through the heavy satin gown. A questioning look, and then the yellow-eyed man fumbled with his breeches as Aziraphale gathered up his skirts.</p><p>Then spit-slick fingers slipped into him; his knee hooked over a hip; a thick cock thrust home.</p><p>Pressed between them, his own cock slid rhythmically against his petticoats. There was a hot pulse, wetness deep inside him, and sharp teeth sank into his shoulder.</p><p>He gasped. Cried out as he came.</p><p>And everything went grey.</p><p>There was a shocking sense of loss as his partner pulled away, and he saw the yellow eyes go wide with dismay. As the world began to fade, the red-haired man plucked a jewel from the tree and closed Aziraphale’s fingers around it.</p><p>Suddenly Aziraphale was stumbling back into his room. The moon had set and the wall where the door had been was empty. Cold seeped into the soles of his feet, and in a daze he realised his slippers were worn through.</p><p>He collapsed amongst his wrinkled satin skirts, blood pooling at his collarbone and come running down his thighs, and an apple like a ruby clutched in his trembling hand.</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>His cry had sent him from the silver orchard, and so he vowed to himself no other sound would pass his lips until he walked again beneath its trees.</p><p>No one noticed the first day of Aziraphale’s silence. He was quiet in the formal court at the best of times, and it was well into the second day before he was found out. They made much of him then, coaxed and commanded, but he refused to speak. His mother sent her physicians, who found the teeth marks in his shoulder. The physicians in turn sent priests, whose prayers and incantations had no effect.</p><p>He put the apple in an old velvet reticule and locked it in a trunk with the gold satin dress. But the ruined shoes he simply left beneath his bed. When a servant discovered them there was a hue and cry, for there had been no dances in the castle for a great many months, and the slippers were of a strange fashion unknown to the shoemakers.</p><p>Aziraphale did not care. Yellow eyes and red hair filled his waking thoughts. He had always been happily plump, but now when he remembered to eat it was only a bite of bread, a sip of wine. He grew thinner, and his suits and gowns had to be taken in.</p><p>Sometimes in secret he took the apple from its hiding place. He turned it this way and that, admiring the smooth red fruit that never withered, and wondered how it would taste. But each time he hid it away again, unbitten.</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>Weeks passed. The marks in his shoulder had healed to pale scars, and the moon had waned dark and waxed back half full when the door reappeared in the wall. Even in his sleep Aziraphale recognised the creaking hinge and woke joyfully, leaping from his bed.</p><p>He unlocked the trunk and took out the gold gown. It was as clean and smooth as it had been when it first appeared on his body. He drew it on in delight; it fit him like a glove. The satin whispered against his skin as he rushed down the spiral stairs.</p><p>When he stepped into the torchlight, his hair was instantly dressed as it had been before. New slippers were on his feet. He ran forward along the tree-lined avenue toward the moving shadows of the silent dancers.</p><p>But the red-haired man – his partner; his lover – was not among them.</p><p>Someone stepped behind him and he turned hopefully, only to find a tall man with a shock of matted white hair whose face was warted like a frog’s and whose eyes were as black as the cavern around them.</p><p>The music began, cacophonous and off-rhythm, and Aziraphale was dragged into the dance.</p><p>The frog man handled him roughly, pulling him this way and that, snarling wordlessly whenever Aziraphale missed a step. The music went on without respite. The soles of the shoes wore thin and then wore through, and Aziraphale’s feet were rasped raw by the glimmering flagstones.</p><p>He had no way to tell how many hours had passed, but at last the noise of a great, unseen bell resonated through the cavern. The music silenced. The dancers stood locked by magic, motionless as statues. And then, through the still bodies, Aziraphale saw him.</p><p>The red-haired man stood behind the musicians, frozen in place with the rest of them. A fine silver chain bound his hands and looped around his neck. His yellow eyes were fixed on Aziraphale.</p><p>Aziraphale took a single step toward him. But at that moment the bell gave a final toll, and everything vanished.  He was utterly alone in the torchlit gloom.</p><p>He rushed to where the man had been, but there was no trace of him left. He circled the empty dance floor, looking for anything, for a way forward, or the path to the silver orchard – but there was nothing other than the avenue by which he’d entered.</p><p>Suddenly the torches began to flicker and dim.</p><p>Aziraphale picked up his skirts and ran to the stairs on bleeding feet. As he passed each torch, it guttered and went out. He had barely trod the first stair when the final torch went dark.</p><p>He barked his toes on the steps more than once as he hurried upward through the blackness. He was terrified the door would be gone, but when he reached the top it was still open, awash in fading moonlight. It disappeared instantly when he passed through.</p><p>He had just enough strength remaining to strip off the golden gown and lock it away once more. He pulled on his nightgown and staggered to bed.</p><p>His mother found him in the morning with the rags of slippers still hanging from his toes.</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>Twice more the door opened, each time on the night of a waxing half-moon; twice more Aziraphale went into the darkness. His bloody footprints remained on the stairs but had disappeared from the mica-sparkled flagstones, as if the stones themselves had drunk them down.</p><p>His next dancing partner had burning red eyes and a lizard’s scales on his forehead. The one after that had a mouthful of crooked, cruelly sharp teeth, and her clothes floated eerily around her as if in water.</p><p>He knew now where to look, and both times Aziraphale saw the red-haired man, still bound by the chain, still watching him with glowing yellow-gold eyes. But Aziraphale could never free himself from the dance. So each time he vanished with the revelers at the toll of the bell and Aziraphale was left to flee in ruined slippers to his chamber.</p><p>In desperation he began poring through the books and scrolls in the castle’s library. He searched for stories, for folklore, for anything that could tell him about the strange happenings in the cavern down the stairs, and especially for anything that could help him free his lover.</p><p>He still spoke no words and took little food. The tailors took in his clothes yet again, but the gold satin dress still fit him flawlessly every time he wore it.</p><p>And the apple from the silver orchard remained red and perfect.</p><p>At last his mother could stand no more. She gathered her people before the castle. She announced that anyone who could solve the mystery of the danced-through shoes, who could bring the smile back to her child’s mouth and words back to his tongue, would have his hand in marriage.</p><p>At this Aziraphale clenched his teeth behind his closed lips. He was obedient to his mother, but his troth was not hers to bestow. And should anyone else manage to discover the secret of the moonlight door, he thought there would perhaps be words, though not ones his mother would want to hear.</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>He finally found the information he sought on the day the grey watchers arrived.</p><p>The dusty pages of the tome crumbled at the edges as Aziraphale turned them and read:</p><p>
  <em>The demons hold great revels in a court beneath the earth. They speak no words, but are known at times to lure a human through a door that appears in moonshine. Such a person will dance to dark music until feet are at the point of bleeding; when the floors they dance upon have soaked enough in blood, the human is turned, and in this way the demons grow their ranks. The halls of their court may be escaped by the sound of a voice. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is prophesied that the power of the demons, along with that of their mortal enemies, shall be broken when a human speaks a demon’s true name.</em>
</p><p>As Aziraphale absorbed this new knowledge, he heard a clamor at the castle gate. He slipped the book back into its place on the shelf and hurried to see.</p><p>Four grey-clad strangers stood before his mother’s throne. Had he not danced with demons in the secret dark, Aziraphale would have thought he had never seen their like – but something predatory in their stances brought to mind the underground court.</p><p>The voice of their leader rang out across the great hall, strong and sure. He boasted that he and his band would seek out the source of Aziraphale’s affliction, that he would win Aziraphale’s hand.</p><p>His mother beckoned. When he reluctantly stepped forward the four strangers turned their piercing gaze upon him. One short and bald; one with dark, close-cut hair; one with auburn curls. The leader was tall and handsome, with black hair and purple eyes. It was he who bowed to kiss Aziraphale’s gloved hand.</p><p>As he straightened, his eyes flicked to Aziraphale’s shoulder, where his blue dress was ill-fitted and loose once again. Aziraphale turned his head and saw the small scars left from fangs. The purple-eyed leader saw them too, and his mouth closed tight and scornful.</p><p>Aziraphale shrank away.</p><p>Heedless of his discomfort, his mother invited the grey watchers to stay and sup at the great table. Aziraphale sat silent through the meal. He could feel their stares upon him, but kept his eyes demurely downcast to the food he did not eat.</p><p>He was grateful to retreat to his chamber when the time came to retire. When he threw open his shutters and surveyed the night sky, he saw the moon had waxed to half.</p><p>As Aziraphale prepared for bed, he heard a rustling outside his door. He opened it only a crack, and saw the short, bald man from the grey band, unrolling a pallet on the floor. His head snapped up at the sound of the door, and his smile showed a great many teeth.</p><p>There was nothing to do but lock the door tight. Aziraphale checked it twice, thrice before settling into bed, where he tossed restlessly beneath the blankets. By and by his eyes grew heavy and he slept.</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>As ever, he was woken by the sound of the moonlight door swinging open. Aziraphale tried to move silently as he slipped from bed and pulled the golden dress from its trunk. One final time he tested the lock to his chamber door, and found it secure.</p><p>He was halfway down the spiral stairs when he sensed a distant flicker of power.</p><p>Aziraphale stilled to listen, straining in the darkness, but he felt nothing more. Finally he continued down the steps. At one moment he thought he heard footsteps far behind him, but again when he stopped there was nothing but silence.</p><p>The magic flare when he emerged into torchlight was well-known by now: his hair bound atop his head, the slippers upon his feet. He was almost to the dancers when a sharp crack echoed behind him. He whirled, skirts swirling, but all he saw were copper leaves drifting softly to the flagstones.  </p><p>A touch at his elbow, and he spun, frightened and ready to flee. But this time, it was the red-haired man – the <em>demon – </em>standing at his side. He reached to tuck a stray curl behind Aziraphale’s ear, smiling, and the leaves were forgotten.</p><p>Aziraphale was swept up into the dance. He gloried in the gentle arm at his waist, the fingers intertwined with his, the yellow eyes on his face; in his joy Aziraphale glowed bright as the sun.</p><p>His partner twirled him round, and for only the second time in his months with the dark court, Aziraphale saw the entrance to the silver orchard. He grew warm with more than just the dancing.</p><p>But as they moved toward the trees, in front of them stepped the smallest demon he’d yet seen, and yet the most terrifying. Boils covered their face, and a cloud of black specks seethed around them; Aziraphale heard a low, angry buzz beneath the dissonant music.</p><p>They positioned themselves firmly before the path. From their fingers the silver chain dangled.</p><p>The red-haired demon met their dark gaze with an angry tilt of his chin, rebellious in the face of the clear warning. But before any further challenge could be made, Aziraphale seized him and spun him back into the crowd.</p><p>He glared down at Aziraphale as they danced, his anger still hot. Aziraphale slipped a hand free and pushed back his sleeve, brushing fingers over the marks of the chain that still darkened the slender wrists: a reproof, a reminder.</p><p>At Aziraphale’s touch on his bare skin the demon’s face softened, eyes gone wide and pupils blown dark against gold irises.</p><p>The rest of the night passed in a blur. Aziraphale hardly noticed the pain of his feet as he moved within his lover’s embrace. He forgot himself completely until the deep bell began to sound and he was jerked to a halt as the dancers were locked still.</p><p>Aziraphale reached up to cup his partner’s face in careful hands. He memorised his features: the red hair and yellow eyes had haunted his dreams, but by touch he now learned the sharp jaw, the pointed nose, the soft lips.</p><p>He had a small black-and-red tattoo of a snake on his face, Aziraphale saw, and he recognised the connection to the gold slit-pupilled eyes, the sinuous grace. The demon. <em>His</em> demon. His <em>Serpent.</em></p><p>The Serpent vanished from beneath his fingers, and alone in the torchlight Aziraphale mourned.</p><p>He made his way back up the stairs to his chamber. As he climbed there was a sudden sharp tug to his skirts, as if from a clumsy step on their edge, and something passed him by in the dark.</p><p>He froze, still as a dancer at the bell, and listened to footsteps ascending ahead.</p><p>When his fear subsided, Aziraphale hurried up the stairs to his room. He rushed to his chamber door and found it still locked. He opened it just enough to see the shape of the bald man beneath a blanket of fine grey wool, sides moving with his breath, though Aziraphale thought perhaps the breaths came faster than sleep alone warranted.</p><p>He pulled off the gold dress and shut it in its trunk. He threw the torn slippers aside as he slid naked beneath his sheets. Sleep could not cut through his exhaustion as his mind clamored. Through his open shutters he watched the sky turn pale, hiding the half-moon, and all he could do was wonder:</p><p>How was he to learn his demon’s true name?</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>With his door locked, the servants had to knock to gain entry. When Aziraphale flung open the door there was no pallet on the floor, no bald watcher; just two kind men with a tray of food he did not want.</p><p>All four watchers were already present when Aziraphale made his appearance in his mother’s court. He eyed them with apprehension, but though they cast him sharp glances they did not speak to him.</p><p>He spent the remainder of the day in the library, but the crumbling book yielded no further secrets and he found no answers elsewhere. He considered how he might ask for a name without making a sound. He did not know the dancing-hands language used by some of his mother’s courtiers, and he had not seen or heard any language used by the demons.</p><p>But he had a month yet to solve this puzzle.</p><p>After another ominous supper with the watchers in attendance, Aziraphale departed the court. As he opened his door, there was an enormous rush of power—like nothing he’d felt before, not even in the underground cavern. He ignored his tender feet and ran back to the great chamber. But the musicians played on, their human music sweet and soothing; the priests calmly burned the evening incense, and the magicians showed no signs of spellcasting.</p><p>The grey band of four, however, were breaking apart. The dark-haired one walked toward Aziraphale, smiling. Without acknowledging her he turned and went quickly back to his room. She followed distantly, unhurriedly behind him.</p><p>As he turned the key in his door he heard the rustle of a pallet being unrolled outside. Again he checked the lock, and again found it secured.</p><p>He went to bed comforted by the surety that there would be no magic door tonight, no staircase with which anyone could follow him down to the dancers in the dark.</p><p>But it seemed as if he had only been asleep for moments before he heard the familiar creak of a hinge. He sat up in bed. In shock he watched the door to the demon court swing gently open.</p><p>It could not be. Aziraphale ran to his window and threw open the shutters.</p><p>The half-moon again hung bright in the night sky.</p><p>He thought wildly that perhaps he had been put to sleep for a month’s time, like a maiden in one of the tales spun by the bards. But the stars had not moved from the previous night, and the soles of Aziraphale’s feet were still painful from the dancing.</p><p>Fear of the grey watchers’ strength filled him. Yet slowly he unlocked the trunk; slowly he drew out the gold satin dress; slowly he pulled it over his head.</p><p>He took parchment, ink, and a quill from his writing desk. The dress had no pockets, and so he carried them carefully down the spiral stairs. As before, there was a flare of magic when he had traveled partway down the stairs. As before, after a pause to listen, with naught but silence resulting, he continued forth.</p><p>When he stepped into the torchlight, his white-blond curls were piled atop his head. The slippers slid onto his feet. And the parchment, ink, and quill were gone from his hands.</p><p>Aziraphale covered his face to hide his tears, disbelieving, despairing.</p><p>But his Serpent approached and Aziraphale let himself be drawn forward down the avenue. Tonight, as before, there was a breaking sound behind him, and when he turned to look he saw golden twigs raining down to the shining stones.</p><p>The demons seemed just as confused as himself at a dance for the second night in a row. But Aziraphale was turned gently, clasped closely, and the pain in his feet was as nothing compared to the warmth in his partner’s hands.</p><p>There was a lull in the music, and they found themselves at the edge of the dance floor, at the entrance to the orchard. Aziraphale knew better than to start down that path. But in the dust he reached with the toe of a slipper to write his name. He looked into his lover’s handsome face, searching for some sign of understanding, hoping for reciprocation.</p><p>He was not even halfway through his long name when someone grasped hold of him. He found himself spun back into the crush of dancers by none other than the tiny, scowling, buzzing demon. Aziraphale tried to pull away, but despite their size their grip on his waist was strong, and he could not escape their hands until the ring of the bell.</p><p>Locked in the stillness, his own angry Serpent stood by the orchard entrance. When Aziraphale touched him, the sharp jaw was clenched tight.</p><p>The demons disappeared behind him as he walked away on raggedly raw feet. He paused only a moment as he heard the patter of footsteps already ahead of him on the stairs.</p><p>He knew what he would find when he reached the top. And indeed, when he peeked into the hall the watcher was there, motionless beneath her grey blanket.</p><p>The dress went into its trunk, and the slippers were cast aside, and the shutters were closed against the fading half-moon. He sank weary and defeated into bed.</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>Aziraphale was no closer to an answer when the demons’ door swung open on the third night.</p><p>The grey watchers had worked their magic once more. He had felt it bright and strong and cold. And once more they had sent a follower with him, the crafty one with auburn curls; she had paced just behind him as he retreated to his chamber, and she had begun to settle herself in the hallway before he even closed the door.</p><p>He did not need to open the shutters to see the half-moon.</p><p>Shoulders bowed under the weight of the satin gown, he hesitated at the top of the stairs, staring at his own footprints, dark with old blood. One last hope occurred to him as he descended the stairs. One last way to write. Lost in thought, he barely sensed the magic behind him, familiar as it was by now.</p><p>The slippers slipped miraculously into place. They barely fit over his swollen feet.</p><p>This night, however, he paused to snap a twig from the diamond-glass tree. He was relieved to see that the broken end was sharp.</p><p>His Serpent approached, but though his heart sang to see him, Aziraphale stopped him with a touch. He looked intently into the lovely yellow eyes. When he was certain the demon was watching, he turned his own forearm over and used the twig to carve a scratch into the soft underside, deep enough that the blood welled to the surface. </p><p>He dipped the twig into this crimson ink. As he lifted it to write, a trickle of blood ran dripping down his arm. Before he could draw so much as a single letter, the Serpent <em>hissed</em>, the first sound Aziraphale had heard him make, and his hand shot out to catch the blood before it could hit the flagstones.</p><p>What did it matter, what did it <em>matter</em>? – the stones had consumed enough that a few drops more would make no difference.</p><p>But the red-haired demon gazed at him reproachfully as he brought his cupped hand to his lips and licked the blood with a forked tongue. And when his fingers were clean, he reached for Aziraphale’s arm.</p><p>Aziraphale dropped the diamond-glass twig. It rolled tinkling over the stones of the avenue.</p><p>The warm mouth met his skin and gently sucked; the long, soft tongue lapped at the wound.</p><p>When the demon released him, the scratch was red and angry but no longer bled. Slim fingers shook out a black silk pocket-square and bound it snug around his arm.</p><p>But still they did not join the dancers, although the eerie music now echoed in the cavern.</p><p>Instead, his Serpent hesitated for a moment, then raised a hand. With a glowing finger he drew a sigil in the air. He placed a hand on his own chest, sketched a tiny bow.</p><p>And Aziraphale realised he was being given the answer to his question:</p><p>His demon’s name.</p><p>And he had no idea how to read or speak it.</p><p>As Aziraphale took in this knowledge – this <em>lack </em>of knowledge – the buzzing demon appeared. Glaring. Expectant.</p><p>His Serpent mantled protectively over him. But all the same, his arm curled around Aziraphale’s waist and drew him forward inexorably to the dance.</p><p>They twirled and twisted, bowed and turned, and through it all Aziraphale was numb to his core. All except his feet, which ground brutally into the sparkling flagstones. Not a print was left behind, though sometimes he thought he saw the stones glitter red.</p><p>At the sound of the bell he did not linger. He did not caress his demon, he did not gaze into the handsome pointed face. He limped listlessly to the staircase.</p><p>The diamond-glass twig he’d broken from the tree was nowhere to be seen.</p><p>Back in his chamber, he did not bother to seek out the watcher. He had no wish to see her pretending to sleep beneath her blanket. Instead, he disrobed.</p><p>He bit his lip when he peeled the bloody shoes from his raw and weeping feet. As he pulled the satin dress over his head, he felt a prickling between his shoulder blades. He sought out his mirror and twisted to see.</p><p>So, he thought dully. This was what he was to be, when he joined the demon court. He wondered what he would look like; wondered if the Serpent would still dance with him when it was done.</p><p>When at last he slid into his bed, he laid himself out on his belly, careful not to crush the feathers that had begun to sprout from his back.</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>On the fourth evening there was dancing in his mother’s grand ballroom.</p><p>Aziraphale had ransacked the library. The sign his demon had drawn burned like a brand in his mind, but he found no record of it in any of the books he consulted.</p><p>He had even slipped into the archives of the magicians and the sanctum of the priests; he had been firmly removed from both, but not before he had ascertained that their grimoires and scrolls did not show the sigil he sought.</p><p>The court’s summons came as a surprise.</p><p>He wore a new gown, one of his favourites from the new clothes the tailors had made for him: light cream silk with ruffles of lace. It had a high back to hide the feathers, and long skirts to hide the tall boots, the only ones he had that were large enough to pad inside with soft cloths. Even so, he fought to not wince with each step as he followed the servant through the halls.</p><p>Over the months underground Aziraphale had become a much more skillful dancer. But now it was his mother’s music that seemed off-key and off-kilter, and he often tripped and mis-stepped.</p><p>The leader of the grey watchers claimed his hand at the end of the evening. His dress was silver, shot through with purple: simple, clean, elegant, like his movements in the dance.</p><p>Next to him, Aziraphale felt frivolous in his ribbons and ruffles. The heavy boots on his painful feet made him clumsy and wrong-footed. And instead of guiding him through the steps, it seemed as if every touch of the leader’s hand was meant to push or pull him out of place.</p><p>He was not the partner Aziraphale would have preferred.</p><p>The music ended and Aziraphale broke away as quickly as he could. As he made his final bows to his mother, the watchers’ magic blasted through him. He looked desperately about – could no one else see it, sense it, this mighty spell? But the court was unperturbed and the music went on.</p><p>When he made his way from the court at last, the leader was waiting for him in the corridor.</p><p>He took Aziraphale’s arm and escorted him – <em>dragged </em>him – to his chamber. He went almost at a run; Aziraphale had to break into an agonizing trot to keep up, and the grip on his arm was inescapable, painful where it crushed the deep scratch. When he looked up, panting, there was no care or concern on his captor’s face. Only contempt, and the greedy anticipation of a predator sighting prey.</p><p>He pushed Aziraphale into his room. Aziraphale whirled, slammed the door shut as hard as he could and turned the key in the lock. But there were no attempts to enter: only rustles and whispers of cloth as the watcher settled to lay in wait.</p><p>Aziraphale shoved his trunk against the door. But what good would a barricade do against someone who could trap the moon?</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>Aziraphale had somehow fallen into a doze when the moonlight door creaked open. He tensed at the noise, but there was no sound from the hallway outside.</p><p>He wondered what would happen if he did not descend.</p><p>But he thought then of the three other nights of footsteps that were not his on the stairs, and he knew he could not leave his lover alone to face whatever the grey leader had in store. And so he donned the gold satin gown.</p><p>For the first time, he tried to shut the door behind himself. It did not move. At last he left it gaping open behind him.</p><p>Halfway down, a crash from upstairs echoed down the staircase: a scrape, a squeal of breaking wood. Aziraphale did not wait to hear more. He rushed downward through the dark.</p><p>In the torchlight he hurried down the glittering avenue, curls tumbling around his shoulders, and careened into the revelers. They swarmed angrily around him. He was shoved, he was slapped. They tried to drag him into the strange rhythm of their music, but he fought them, thrashing wildly, until warm fingers closed around his elbow and he looked up into yellow-gold eyes.</p><p>The disrupted dancers stilled then, focused intently on Aziraphale. Waiting. Confused. Furious, all of them, but for the Serpent, who watched him anxiously.</p><p>In the hush of their suspense, Aziraphale heard the scuff of swift footsteps. Dust puffed on the path to the silver orchard.</p><p>A smash echoed loud throughout the great cavern.</p><p>The mob left them, seething away toward the silver trees. Aziraphale and his demon followed in their wake.</p><p>In the orchard there was mayhem and destruction.</p><p>They were just in time to see the leader of the grey watchers show himself, whipping free from a swirl of grey wool that was not a blanket after all. It was a cape: a magic cloak concealing him, that now revealed him when he cast it down at his feet.</p><p>He had a great iron sword that glowed cold, and he swung it about, knocking the jeweled fruit from the trees to shatter on the ground.</p><p>As each fruit broke, a demon shivered apart.</p><p>They did not die, but their human seemings were cast from them. In their place loomed enormous creatures. A vile lizard. A dead-eyed frog. A sharp-toothed fish, drifting in the chilly air. One after another they disintegrated. All that remained was an occult menagerie, viciously roiling through the darkness.</p><p>The last fruit dropped from the last tree. The tiny demon exploded into a horde of angry flies, their buzzing almost a shriek.</p><p>Yet his own demon still stood beside him, tall and red-haired, unflinching. Aziraphale stared at him in stunned wonder.</p><p>Yellow eyes met purple. The watcher surged forward in fury.</p><p>But Aziraphale, who walked again beneath the silver trees, who had fulfilled his vow, threw himself between his lover and the raised iron sword with a shout of defiance.</p><p>At his cry, the world went grey.</p><p>He could see the other human, could see this time what was happening: they both began to blur and dissolve. As they faded, the watcher snatched a broken silver branch from the wreckage of the trees.</p><p>When the magic sent Aziraphale staggering back into his room, there was no watcher, but he saw that his door had been blown from its hinges. Saw the debris of his trunk, shattered and scattered across the floor. Everything that had been in it was torn to pieces – except for the velvet reticule, tumbled in a far corner, bulging with its secret.</p><p>With the final apple from the silver orchard.</p><p>Aziraphale seized the purse and twisted its worn ribbons around his wrist. Gathered up his gold satin skirts. And ran.</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>Though the half-moon was still in the sky, a throng of people had assembled to see the spectacle in his mother’s great hall.</p><p>Each step like knives in his feet, Aziraphale pushed his way to the front, where the priests and magicians chanted together over a lit brazier burning with evil-smelling incense. The four grey watchers stood in a row before them.</p><p>One by one they cast branches into the fire, branches from the underground trees, copper and gold. When the auburn-curled watcher threw in the diamond-glass twig, a great heat coursed through Aziraphale, as if his very blood was aflame.</p><p>The leader stepped forward last. He held the branch of silver.</p><p>He set it alight.</p><p>Dark smoke billowed forth. It filled the hall, making the crowd choke and cough. A low and angry buzzing began.</p><p>When the smoke cleared, all around them were the demons, the monstrous horde. His own Serpent stood among them, small and alone in his man-shaped form.</p><p>The watchers drew their swords. Fierce, hateful joy radiated from them as they stood ready for the fight.</p><p>Aziraphale fell to his knees.</p><p>He pulled the red apple from his purse and raised it to his lips. Its crisp skin broke beneath his teeth. Juice burst sweet over his tongue, and with it a single name rang through him like a bright bell.</p><p>He did not shout it when he spoke, but called it gently, in tenderness and love.</p><p>“Crowley.”</p><p>The world around them came to a stop.</p><p>The whole of the host, demon and watcher alike, turned to him in terror. Then they crumbled silently into black and silver dust. A hot wind blew through the hall and mingled them together into a great cloud.</p><p>And through the cloud Crowley came to him, and lifted him to his bloodied feet, and kissed him.</p><p> </p><p>With clasped hands, they walked together from his mother’s hall.</p><p>*~*~*</p><p>For the rest of their days, they would both bear reminders of their time in the demon court.</p><p>Aziraphale was not sorry to trade the grand castle for their cottage by the ocean. Crowley kept the hinges of their doors well-oiled, for Aziraphale flinched when he heard them creaking.</p><p>They both dreaded the sound of music for many years, until Crowley carved a wooden flute and taught himself to play while Aziraphale kept time on a little drum they bought from a tinker.</p><p>But they never danced again.</p><p>Crowley’s yellow-gold eyes would forever have slit pupils. His mouth would forever have fangs. Aziraphale loved to feel them against his lips when they kissed.</p><p>And Aziraphale’s feathers never disappeared. Crowley liked to run his hands through them while they made love: bent over Aziraphale’s back on the rug before their hearth, or from beneath, as Aziraphale arched atop him, in the evenings they sometimes spent on the cliffs above the sea.</p><p>On nights when the moon had waxed half-full, Aziraphale could not bear to stay within walls where a door might appear. They walked then over the meadows where the sky was clear and open. Crowley told him stories of the stars.</p><p>The door Aziraphale opened now, however, did not reveal a dark staircase. He threw it wide to let in the smells of his husband’s garden: clean dirt, growing plants, sharp herbs. Flowers warm in the sunshine.</p><p>“Crowley!” he called. “Come and get something to eat.”</p><p>As he laid out their meal – wine, and honey, and his own fresh-baked bread – Crowley came in with a grin and a basket of fruit over his arm. “Look what I brought for you. They’re finally ripe.”</p><p>He tumbled a dozen apples across the table.</p><p>Aziraphale smiled, and chose the brightest, reddest one, and took a bite.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This work is a (quasi-)mystery written for the GO-Events Mystery AU event, but it began life many months ago as a ficlet written for the 5th round of the Events Discord's Name That Author game. (The prompt: "There is a door that should never be open. It's open.")</p><p>It's very loosely inspired by one of my favorite fairy tales, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Dancing_Princesses">The Twelve Dancing Princesses</a>. </p><p>Many thanks to my darling <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pyracantha">Pyracantha</a> for cheerleading and feedback; to the lovely <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/darcylindbergh">darcylindbergh</a> for reassurance about the mystery aspect of the story; and to the always marvelous <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anti_kate/">Anti_kate</a> for the lightspeed beta of the last version.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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